Spring Time with M-Hub

I recently sent out this missive to the friends of M-Hub, our online project for networking students with adult experts within our high school learning community.

Lest you think that M-Hub has fallen by the wayside, I thought I would give you an update on our feverish behind the scenes activity:

We are now working directly with the school web designer on the web site for M-Hub.  Our leadership team developed the home page and essential additional pages.  He did not blink when the girls asked for assorted bells & whistles, but their proposals were thought through with intelligence and careful consideration in regard to how first time visitors might respond.  They are intent on creating a clean, user-friendly environment.

Some of M-Hub's finest!

On April 18, two teams of students met under the supervision of Susan Smith, alumna and Art Department Chair.  They designed features for our student profile page and data collection page (The one that we will be inviting many of you to visit in the near future).  I passed their ideas on to the web designer who has already installed them on the site.

Essentially, there was much more work and planning for the web infrastructure than we ever imagined, but thanks to the terrific support of Will Gervais (Administration) and Julie Earle (Advancement), we remain undaunted and have made amazing progress in creating a site that is surpassing our wildest dreams.

Obviously, we still lack data before M-Hub can be rolled out as a useful networking tool for our students.  So that will be an immense task for Fall.  Then, attendant upon that chore, we will have a major educational task for members of our learning community.  But we have every reason to believe that M-Hub can be operational for the 2011-12 school year.  

Some final notes:

* Those of you who participated in our Zoomerang beta-test made a very valuable contribution to this year's progress.

* The M-Hub Project has remained student-driven.  What you will eventually see will be the result of a marvelous collaboration between our dedicated students and various adults they have tapped for expertise.  The goal of M-Hub is "to help MHS students build learning networks which leverage technology."  Essentially, building M-Hub has provided this very type of experience.

* We are trying to be foresighted in terms of creating a basic site to which modules can be added if M-Hub becomes as robust as we hope.

* School Administration has given unqualified support to our venture.  They have encouraged the girls every step of the way.

Thanks for your interest and support,

L.

Women Mean Business (and my students benefit!)

I gave my tenth grade students extra credit for attending our school's Women Mean Business Symposium. Besides being a great experience in and of itself, it relates closely to an upcoming class project.  However, when students reported back to me on their experiences I was delighted to find how valuable the event had been at teaching the importance of two themes I have emphasized in my professional development sessions this year:

1) The vital importance of learning to network.

2) The recognition that failure (and learning from it) is critical to the learning process.

The Importance of Networking

At the end of the night I received the business cards of the three women who were seated at my table.  An invitation was also extended to me by Cindy Cooper to visit WJR Radio for a tour of their facility.  Cynthia Robinette and Katherine Sharkey extended similar invitations. . . . .At the end of the night, I also spoke to Kathleen Ryan about her experience at Notre Dame which is one school that I have been considering.  I thought it was a successful night and I gained many new contacts and benefitted from the experience.   -- Jaclyn

Our Table leader was very energetic and wanted us to get involved, she brought us up to meet the women who were speaking and allowed us to ask them any questions that we wanted. We even got to take a picture with one of the speakers.   -- Amber

One thing that was great about this symposium, was that it surrounded you with women who were driven for success and that touched you to do the same. . . . When I was sitting there and listening to their answers and their comments you felt inspired and Itruly believe I left with something there that night. One thing I was also happy about was it was a great place to network. That is another thing that they mentioned that was a key thing to move up and would be helpful if you need an internship or if you were just looking for more information. . . .This was a great experience and actually I had myfirst experience at networking, Mrs. Ewald offered me to shadow her at Children’sHospital for a day.   -- Brittany

Learning from Failure

It was good to see such a successful women up there telling us one of the most embarrassing stories and realize that people make mistakes, even women, and it is easy to correct yourself and continue with what you are doing. Looking at all the successful women up there and realizing that they are not perfect makes it even easier to get myself out there and gain the courage to do what they do.  -- Lauren

My favorite was Kathy Ryan because I loved her personality. She told us an embarrassing story which I loved because she was able to laugh at her mistakes, unlike me. We talked for a while and she literally let her hair down, which I thought was really funny. She didn’t even seem like a judge! All the students from my table took a picture with Judge Ryan. Meeting her was my absolute favorite part of the night! . . .Overall, this whole experience was inspirational for me.    -- Briana

. . . .They told us that no one is perfect, we are all going to make mistakes, but it is what you do with your mistakes that make you who you are. The main thing that I took out of the whole discussion was you have to love what you do. -- Mary

The Inside-Out Knowledge Network

As the year draws to a close this week, I am republishing five favorite Drive-thru items from 2010.  Today's item first  appeared in April.  The idea of the "inside-out" approach to teaching PLNs is original as far as I know.  Since working it out last spring, I've found at conferences that the approach resonates with listeners.


 In my last post I advocated helping our students learn to build personal learning networks by encouraging them to seek specific information to their questions in real time from real people. I think that this should be done "inside-out" by guiding them to familiar resources within their schools, families, and local community.

In Five 10th Graders Jump Outside of the Box, I think I demonstrated how authentic and self-directed this can be. In Rewiring the Learning Networks for Schools, I shared a video which shows how students can "cultivate their curiosity"* by asking nuanced questions to experts and then expressing the experience through multi-media.

Now, granted, at a college prep school like ours we teach students to write research "papers" with formal annotation using vetted sources from academic journals and the like. I am not demanding that we abandon this age-old "college prep" system for culling information and synthesizing it to support a thesis. But in terms of guiding our students to authentically learn about topics and get their real questions answered, why aren't we networking them with real-time experts and real-time persons? It would be ironic to suppose that the teacher down the hall is only an expert on her subject when she is assigned to teach a certain set of students a certain time of the day. To heck with the schedule. Let's make her available to any student in the school.

Then, let's build this network "inside-out". Let's add folks within the reach of our school community to our grid. Whenever I've brainstormed with classes of students about finding "experts" we've always identified parents, friends' parents, or persons these parents know. We have alumnae who are experts in all fields imaginable. In virtually every instance, whenever a student has approached one of these persons for knowledge, they have enthusiastically welcomed this. Why can't we start collecting persons like these in a database so that we can tap them with an email question, an interview or even invite them to one of our classes as a speaker?

And don't you dare shoot this idea down by suggesting that I am trying to replace a school library or setting up these "experts" to be barraged by inquiries. Our conceptual framework of research is so far removed from this at the present time to render these concerns absurd. Besides, we would not add someone to our grid without his or her explicit permission.

Yes, I have very definite ideas about approaching this exciting challenge. In my next post I am going to explain (drum roll, please) The M-Hub Project-- "A knowledge hub project designed to leverage new technologies in order to facility authentic learning experiences for Marlins of all ages."

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Screen Shot "Personal Learning Network" Ning

The Inside-out Knowledge Network

In my last post I advocated helping our students learn to build personal learning networks by encouraging them to seek specific information to their questions in real time from real people. I think that this should be done "inside-out" by guiding them to familiar resources within their schools, families, and local community.

In Five 10th Graders Jump Outside of the Box, I think I demonstrated how authentic and self-directed this can be. In Rewiring the Learning Networks for Schools, I shared a video which shows how students can "cultivate their curiosity"* by asking nuanced questions to experts and then expressing the experience through multi-media.

Now, granted, at a college prep school like ours we teach students to write research "papers" with formal annotation using vetted sources from academic journals and the like. I am not demanding that we abandon this age-old "college prep" system for culling information and synthesizing it to support a thesis. But in terms of guiding our students to authentically learn about topics and get their real questions answered, why aren't we networking them with real-time experts and real-time persons? It would be ironic to suppose that the teacher down the hall is only an expert on her subject when she is assigned to teach a certain set of students a certain time of the day. To heck with the schedule. Let's make her available to any student in the school.

Then, let's build this network "inside-out". Let's add folks within the reach of our school community to our grid. Whenever I've brainstormed with classes of students about finding "experts" we've always identified parents, friends' parents, or persons these parents know. We have alumnae who are experts in all fields imaginable. In virtually every instance, whenever a student has approached one of these persons for knowledge, they have enthusiastically welcomed this. Why can't we start collecting persons like these in a database so that we can tap them with an email question, an interview or even invite them to one of our classes as a speaker?

And don't you dare shoot this idea down by suggesting that I am trying to replace a school library or setting up these "experts" to be barraged by inquiries. Our conceptual framework of research is so far removed from this at the present time to render these concerns absurd. Besides, we would not add someone to our grid without his or her explicit permission.

Yes, I have very definite ideas about approaching this exciting challenge. In my next post I am going to explain (drum roll, please) The M-Hub Project-- "A knowledge hub project designed to leverage new technologies in order to facility authentic learning experiences for Marlins of all ages."

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Screen shot of 6th period "Teen Rights" Wikispaces page
*From Tony Wagner's "The Global Achievement Gap"